Retriever Cloud for Office 365

Note: If you'd prefer a video walkthrough of Retriever Cloud for Office 365, you'll find that at the bottom of this post.

In order to begin syncing your Activity and Contact data between Redtail CRM and Office 365, you'll first need to establish the link between the two programs. To do so:

From within Redtail CRM, go to your Manage Integrations area:

Then, scroll down until you see Retriever Cloud, click its Actions cog and choose "Settings":

You'll then see the below:

Let's take a look at your available settings options here.

Sync Contacts? Check off this option if you want to include Contacts as a part of your sync with Outlook. You'll then be able to click inside the box beneath that option to see a list of your Tag Groups in Redtail CRM and from this list you'll need to select the Tag Group you want to sync to Outlook.

Sync Activities? Check off this option if you want to include Activities as a part of your sync with Outlook. You'll then be able to click inside the box beneath that option to see a list of your Activity Types in Redtail CRM and from this list you can select any number of those Activity Types you want to sync to Outlook.

Sync Completed? Check off this option if you want to include Completed Activities as a part of your sync with Outlook.

Sync deletions into Redtail? Check off this option if you want deletions made in Outlook to sync over to Redtail.

Set an Activity Reminder? Choosing a time increment here will allow you to sync activities to Outlook with your selected reminder time (in minutes). If you leave this at "0", reminders won't be set or the calendar default will prevail.

Enable Outlook Sync button. Click to enable the sync process.

You'll then be redirected to Office 365 to enter in your credentials and signify your agreement to allow Retriever Cloud the access it needs. After completing the required fields on this form, you'll be redirected back to the CRM and a message should appear at the top of Manage Integrations that says you've successfully enabled the integration.

NOTE: if you later change your Office password, you will need to re-authenticate the connection between Office 365 and Redtail to reestablish this connection (go through the steps above again), as it will no longer work when the password has been changed.

Now that the integration is enabled, you'll see a Redtail Calendar and a Redtail Contacts folder appear in your Outlook program on the web, and Contacts and Activities will begin to sync between the two systems. You can create and update Contacts and Activities in both Redtail CRM and in Office 365, and updates and creates will sync in both directions.

Let's take a more detailed look below at what you can expect in regard to both the Activities Sync and the Contact Sync.

Activities Sync

Newly created and existing activities in Redtail that the user is an attendee of are synced. Only existing open activities within the range of (today - 1 year) to (today + 1 year) are synced during the initial sync.

One caveat concerns repeating activities with overlapping occurrences - these will not sync. For example, an activity that repeats weekly but has a duration of two weeks will not sync.

During the initial sync, we create a calendar named "Redtail" in Outlook. All activities from Redtail are synced to this calendar, and we only sync activities from Outlook that are created in this calendar. Any existing activities in the user's default Outlook calendar, or other non-Redtail calendars, are not synced.

Retriever Cloud respects activity permissions defined in Redtail. If a user is an attendee of an activity but does not have permission to view it, the activity is still synced to Office 365 but with most fields hidden.

At this time Retriever does not provide a way for a user to sync multiple users' calendars from Redtail to their Office 365 account. As a workaround, users can share their calendars within Office 365 to other Office 365 users by clicking on the "Share" button in the upper right hand corner of the Calendar UI. Do note though: if you share your Outlook calendar with another user in Outlook, but you have activities from Redtail that are private to you, they may be visible through the Outlook share to any user you share your Outlook calendar with since Outlook doesn't support activity privacy. In other words, if your firm utilizes activity privacy settings within Redtail, you wouldn't want to share your Outlook calendar if you are using Retriever Cloud to sync to Outlook.

Differences from Retriever for Tailwag (R4T)

Activities in Redtail with a type of Task do not sync to Outlook's Tasks folder, as they did in R4T. All activity types in Redtail sync to the Redtail folder in Outlook's Calendar.

Time Zone

Retriever Cloud requires users to have the same time zone configured in Redtail and Office 365. Different time zones across the services will cause unexpected behavior when syncing.

Recurring Activity Exceptions

Due to limitations imposed by bugs in Redtail's recurring activity exceptions, syncing of recurring activity exceptions from Outlook has some strange behavior. After creating a recurring activity exception in Outlook, the exception will disappear for several seconds and then be re-created in Outlook.

Operations

Note, if you check off the Sync deletions into Redtail? option in this integration's settings, activity deletions will sync in both directions as well.

Activity Field Mapping

Note: a yearly or monthly Activity that repeats on multiple ordinals will not, unfortunately, come over from Redtail into Outlook. For example: An Activity that occurs on the first and third Mondays of July will not come over in the sync. Daily and weekly Activities are not affected by this.

Contact Sync

When a user sets up Retriever Cloud, they select a tag group to determine which contacts to sync. Existing contacts in the the tag group and new contacts added to the tag group are synced.

During the initial sync, we create a folder named "Redtail" in Outlook. All contacts from Redtail are synced to this folder, and we only sync contacts from Outlook created in this folder. Note: contacts won’t sync from Office 365 to Redtail until after the initial sync has completed. Any existing contacts in the user's default Outlook contact folder, or other non-Redtail folders, are not synced.

When a contact is removed from the tag group configured for Retriever, it is deleted from the user's Office 365 account.

Incoming contacts to Redtail from Retriever are automatically added to the user's Retriever tag group.

Multiple users can select the same tag group to sync. When a user creates a contact in Office 365, Retriever will sync that Contact to Redtail as well as to any other users' Office 365 accounts that have the same tag group configured.

Retriever Cloud respects contact permissions defined in Redtail. If two users have the same tag group configured, but only one of the users has access to a contact, then the user without access will not have the contact synced to their Office 365 account.

Differences from Retriever for Tailwag (R4T)

Fields that no longer sync:

Gender

Assistant's Name and Phone Number

Operations

Note, if you check off the Sync deletions into Redtail? option in this integration's settings, contact deletions will sync in both directions as well.

Contact Field Mapping

Disabling the Integration

In order to disable the integration, choose the "Disable" option in the Integration Settings modal :

When disabling the integration, all current Office 365 Redtail folders should be removed automatically. After disabling Retriever Cloud, we do recommend that you check for those Redtail folders in Office 365, as in rare instances, the folders may not have been removed and you may need to remove them manually. If you don't remove them in those cases, and set the integration up again, NEW Redtail folders named Redtail, but this time with timestamps appended, will be created in your Outlook Contacts and Calendar.